Pep Cruz: "Why should I go to Madrid, the adversary that has screwed us over for 500 years?"

GironaThe brief résumé he has written, barely more than four lines long, does little justice to his immense professional career in the performing arts, not only for the sheer number of roles he has played, but also for the quality of the plays in which he has acted and the excellence with which he has interpreted each character. "Pep Cruz is theater personified," critics have said of him. "An actor who does everything well," has also been written about him. "The most popular and beloved of the actors in the Catalan theatrical pantheon," others have added. Born in Girona in 1948 and honed as an actor in this city, Pep Cruz has worked as a performer, director, or screenwriter on nearly one hundred plays, including Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear, Forido Pensil either Infantilisms; she has acted in 8 musicals, including the successful Sea and sky; in 8 television series, such as Ventdelplà and Oh! Europeand in more than thirty films.

Despite being one of the Catalan actors who has worked the most and the best, Pep Cruz has been among the least awarded, but that doesn't bother him. "For me, an actor's greatest reward is filling theaters. I work for the people, not to win awards, which are only to satisfy the actor's ego," he says.

It's also a reward for him to have succeeded without having to leave Catalonia: "If I'm Catalan and I can do my work in Catalonia, why should I go to Madrid, to the home of the adversary, who have screwed us over for 500 years? To be more famous? To win awards? I've always been very clear about that."

At 78, Pep Cruz is still in top form and works tirelessly, as he always has, maintaining the same eagerness to improve with each performance as he did the first day he stepped onto a stage. "I haven't pursued a professional career because I don't like to rush things. What I've done is play an instrument, and I'm still doing that. This means preparing myself physically and intellectually to perform, constantly studying theater, perfecting my voice and breathing, reading a lot, going to see plays, and, above all, doing a lot of theater, because theater is something you learn."

He began learning at a very young age in his hometown of Girona, where he founded the TEI de Sant Marçal company, along with Andreu Caamaño, Maite Martí, and Pep, Quico, and Mariona Estivill, among others.

These were the late Franco years, and with provocative, innovative theater that critiqued social reality, the company filled theaters everywhere they performed, despite the constant threat of censorship, which often applied the ruthless scissors or outright bans. "We were already using methods of physical expression that we learned from books I went to buy in Montpellier or Perpignan when these techniques weren't even being discussed here yet," recalls Pep Cruz. The actor was also the driving force behind the Theater Group of the Girona Region, which brought theater to numerous secondary schools and vocational training centers in towns and cities throughout the area, and the massive puppet shows that the Sant Marçal Puppet Company programmed for the Girona Fairs.

Engineer at Chupa Chups

An engineer by training, Pep Cruz combined his passion for theater with his job at Chupa-Chups in Barcelona, ​​on Carrer de París, where he was export manager. "When I finished work at Chupa-Chups, I'd take a train to Girona, where they'd be waiting for me at the station with a car to take me to the headquarters of the TEI San Marçal theater company to rehearse until one in the morning. They knew me and were kind enough not to wake me up. Then my son Marçal was born, and I decided that had to stop and I dedicated myself exclusively to theater in Girona," he explains.

The leap to Barcelona with Flotats

A call from Josep Maria Flotats offering him a screen test for the role of Ragueneau in the play Cyrano de Bergerac The performance at the Poliorama Theatre in Barcelona represented a leap forward in Pep Cruz's professional career and a change of residence. "It was said and done: two days later, Flotats called me to tell me the role was mine," Cruz recounts. He was 36 years old and has lived in the Catalan capital ever since with his current partner, the actress Anna Rosa Cisquella. His heart, however, remains in Girona, where he still owns his parents' house, although he rents it out, and where he often goes to visit his siblings. He says he owes his "theatrical, cultural, and intellectual development" to Girona, as well as his rebellious spirit, nurtured in large part at the bar L'Arc, an establishment whose owner, Lluís Bonaventura, coined the slogan: "We have a cathedral in the courtyard," since it is located directly opposite the cathedral steps. During the dictatorship, L'Arc was a meeting place for intellectuals and was like a second home to Pep Cruz. "There you would find people as daring as the journalists who created the magazine Presence "In those difficult times, even at five in the morning, Lluís could make you some sardines that he himself had gone to buy in some seaside town," he recalls. Cruz proudly claims to have contributed to creating the imprint that can be seen on the railing to the right of the stone steps of the cathedral, above it like a slide. "I went to high school in the old Capuchin monastery, and the cathedral steps were our playground," the actor recounts. "I used to go with my cousin to buy 'a peseta' worth of olives.' When we were little, they told us that the engineer of the Eiffel Tower had built it, and that fascinated us," says Cruz, who nostalgically remembers another bridge, much smaller and more modest, that was washed away in a downpour and that he and his parents used to go to the Girona FC stadium on match days.